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Tristram Shandy

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Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded

Samuel Richardson's epistolary novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, published in 1740, tells the story of a young woman's resistance to the desires of her predatory master. Pamela is determined to protect her virginity and remain a paragon of virtue; however, the heroine's moral principles only strengthen the resolve of Mr. B and Pamela soon finds herself imprisoned against her will. The young woman's affection for her captor gradually grows and she becomes aware of a love that combines eros and agape.

Evelina: Or, the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World

Originally published in 1778, Evelina is Frances Burney's first and most beloved novel. It was a landmark in the development of the novel of manners and went on to influence such enduringly popular authors as Jane Austen. By turns hilarious and grim, witty and lyrical, the story follows young Evelina as she leaves the seclusion of her country home and enters into late eighteenth-century London society - both its pleasures and its dangers. Life in eighteenth-century England is vividly rendered as Evelina is educated in the ways of the world and, eventually, love.

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Persuasion

Anne Elliot has grieved for seven years over the loss of her first love, Captain Frederick Wentworth. But events conspire to unravel the knots of deceit and misunderstanding in this beguiling and gently comic story of love and fidelity.

The Sound and the Fury

First published in 1929, Faulkner created his "heart's darling", the beautiful and tragic Caddy Compson, whose story Faulkner told through separate monologues by her three brothers: the idiot Benjy, the neurotic suicidal Quentin, and the monstrous Jason.

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In one of the first novels in the English language, we follow the picaresque adventures of Joseph Andrews, a virtuous young man who is keen to maintain his innocence despite being coerced by nearly every woman he encounters.

Invisible Cities

In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo - Tartar emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts the emperor with tales of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. Soon it becomes clear that each of these fantastic places is really the same place.

The Pickwick Papers

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The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker

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The Castle of Otranto

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Dubliners (Harper Audio Edition)

James Joyce revolutionized twentieth-century writing with his "stream of consciousness" technique. While ingeniously innovative and experimental, he was also a keenly precise chronicler of the people, places, and sounds of his native Dublin. In Dubliners, a cast of 15 internationally famous stage and screen actors perform stories that make up a brilliant journey over a human landscape that captures the bleakest of despair to the most blinding of epiphanies.

Evelina

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The Monk

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Histories

In this, the first prose history in European civilization, Herodotus describes the growth of the Persian Empire with force, authority, and style. Perhaps most famously, the book tells the heroic tale of the Greeks' resistance to the vast invading force assembled by Xerxes, king of Persia. Here are not only the great battles - Marathon, Thermopylae, and Salamis - but also penetrating human insight and a powerful sense of epic destiny at work.

The Portrait of a Lady

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The Invisible Man

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Rasselas: Prince of Abyssinia

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Mansfield Park

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Audible Editor Reviews

Laurence Sterne is perhaps best remembered for his daunting tome Tristam Shandy, however in the years leading up to his death he traveled extensively through France and Italy producing the well-loved novel A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. Award-winning actor Anton Lesser lends his voice to the production of this classic fictionalized account of Sterne’s travels, and with his enthusiastic nearly falsetto delivery audiences will feel all the playfulness and adventure of the original text at full strength. Listeners are sure to enjoy this production of one of the early great travel books.

Publisher's Summary

Published just months before his death in 1768, A Sentimental Journey is Sterne's lightly fictionalised account of his own European travels. And being Sterne, it is more about digressions, misunderstandings, and risqué jokes than the places he visits. Narrated by the (apparently) innocent Parson Yorick, who appeared in Sterne's other masterpiece, Tristram Shandy, it is full of anecdote and incident, and is far more about the people than the landscapes on the road from Calais. Despite the title, any sentimentality is offset by the elegance of the writing, the engaging companionship of Yorick himself, and the constant, playful surprises.